The 2024 Annual Meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) was held in Seattle, USA, from October 20 to 23. A team of faculty and students from the School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering at Hefei University of Technology, led by Professor Zhan Shuguang and Associate Professor Wang Dian, participated in the Railway Applications Section (RAS) international competitions. They presented their research findings at the INFORMS RAS sessions and achieved remarkable results: second place globally in the Problem Solving Competition and fourth place globally in the Student Paper Competition.
INFORMS is one of the largest and most influential academic organizations in the field of operations research and management sciences worldwide. RAS specializes in research on railway operations optimization and has made significant contributions to promoting the extensive application of optimization techniques in the railway sector. Every year, the RAS hosts a Problem Solving Competition addressing practical and challenging issues in railway transportation. The competition attracts numerous experts and scholars from leading universities and renowned enterprises across the globe. The Student Paper Competition invites participation from graduate students at universities and research institutions worldwide, requiring high-quality academic papers on topics related to rail transportation operations for evaluation.
Professor Zhan Shuguang and Associate Professor Wang Dian led a team of master’s students - Zhang Jianhao, Yang Jingyan, and Yao Ling - to participate in the 2024 INFORMS RAS Problem Solving Competition. This year’s competition focused on the “Optimization of Flat Switching Operations at Railway Freight Terminals.” Participants were tasked with arranging cars from different destinations in a specified order and assigning them to appropriate tracks in the terminal, while considering constraints on the number and length of tracks. The objective was to minimize the shunting locomotive and car movement duration time during the switching process. After over five months of dedicated effort, the team developed a mixed-integer linear programming model and designed an efficient heuristic algorithm to generate high-quality solutions. Their outstanding performance earned them second place in the competition.
The contest provided the team members with deep insights into the complexity of optimization problems in the railway sector and the challenges faced by railway workers, significantly enhancing their ability to solve real-world problems.
Additionally, doctoral student Xiu Cong, under the guidance of Prof. Zhan Shuguang, submitted a high-quality academic paper titled Passenger-oriented Timetable Rescheduling Problem in a Railway Network During Severe Disruptions, with Prof. Zhan serving as the corresponding author. This paper secured fourth place in the 2024 INFORMS RAS Student Paper Competition. Since its inception in 2002, the INFORMS RAS Student Paper Competition has been held for 23 years, annually inviting submissions of high-quality academic papers from graduate students worldwide on topics related to railway transportation organization and optimization. A panel of senior experts in the field selects the top three or four papers for awards. Many winning papers from past competitions have subsequently been published, following rigorous peer review, in leading journals in the transportation field, such as Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Science, and Transportation Research Part C.
(Text/Photos by Zhan Shuguang, Reviewed by Zhang Jinwei)
